Culture

A hormone that is released in our brain when we fall in love also makes starfish turn their stomach inside out to feed, according to a new study from Queen Mary University of London.

Oxytocin, more commonly known as the 'love hormone', is important for sexual reproduction in humans, other mammals and even nematode worms, but this study shows that in the common European starfish (Asterias rubens) it is important for feeding.

The findings, published in the journal BMC Biology, could play an important role in controlling the feeding behavior of the crown of thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), which feeds on coral and is having a devastating impact on the Australian Great Barrier Reef.

Based on this study the researchers know that oxytocin-type molecules have been acting in the nervous systems of animals for over half-a-billion years.

However, the effects on feeding can be very different in different animal types - in starfish oxytocin-type molecules seem to be important for normal feeding to occur whereas studies on mice have revealed that oxytocin inhibits feeding behaviour.

Professor Maurice Elphick, lead author of the study from Queen Mary University of London, said: "Our study has provided important new evidence that oxytocin-type molecules are important and ancient regulators of feeding in animals. So oxytocin is much more than a 'love hormone' - perhaps especially for animals like starfish that don't fall in love!"

Esther Odekunle, formerly a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, added: "If the 'love hormone' plays a role in the feeding behaviour of the crown of thorns starfish, then this research may provide a basis for the development of novel chemical methods to control their appetite for coral."

To investigate the role of the hormone, the researchers had to inject it into the starfish to see if anything happened.

Within a few minutes the injected starfish started bending their arms and adopted a 'humped' posture similar to the posture used when they are feeding. Furthermore, it caused the starfish to evert their stomach out of their mouth.

This was an interesting combination of effects because starfish feed naturally by climbing on top of prey such as mussels or oysters and adopting a rigid humped posture so that they can employ the pulling power of lots of tiny tube feet on the underside of each arm to pull apart the two valves of their prey.

Having created a tiny gap, the starfish then evert their stomach out of their mouth, through the gap and into the body of the prey - where they proceed to digest the soft tissues of the prey into a soup-like mixture, which is then drawn back into the starfish as food.

When all of the prey tissue has been digested the starfish withdraws its stomach back into its mouth, leaving behind an empty shell and moving off to find its next victim.

Professor Elphick said: "What is fascinating is that injecting the hormone in starfish induces what is known as fictive feeding. The starfish are behaving as if they are feeding on a mussel or an oyster but no mussel or oyster is there to be eaten."

The researchers found that the effect of the hormone is so powerful it made starfish 2-3 times slower at righting themselves when flipped over. This is an important defense behavior in nature as they can be upturned by strong waves.

What they also found was that both the hormone and its receptor are found in many regions of the starfish body - including the central nervous system and the stomach. These findings are consistent with the striking effects of the oxytocin-like molecule on starfish behaviour.

Researchers from the University of Paderborn and University of Rostock, both in Germany, published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines how the purchase of a gift may promote future brand loyalty with the gifted brand.

The study, forthcoming in the September issue of the Journal of Marketing and titled "Gift Purchases as Catalysts for Strengthening Customer-Brand Relationships," is authored by Andreas Eggert, Lena Steinhoff, and Carina Witte.

Companies are constantly looking for new ways to engage customers with their brands and to build deep and lasting customer-brand relationships. While gifts have been recognized as an effective means to build interpersonal relationships, they can also jump-start customer-brand relationships. The purchase of gifts may engage customers deeply with the gifted brand and promote their future brand loyalty. Also, in contrast with most of marketing's relationship-building instruments, encouraging customers' gifting behavior does not trigger any considerable costs, but instead generates instant returns.

The research team first conducted a field study with an international retailer of beauty products. The hypothesis is that customers purchasing gifts display higher future purchase behaviors towards the brand. The researchers expected that these positive effects would decrease for customers with more purchase experience.

Key findings include:

Gift buyers spend 63% more in the year following a gift purchase than a matched sample of customers who purchase the brand for their personal use.

Gift buyers increase their purchase frequency (25%), spend more per shopping trip (41%), and engage in more cross-buying (49%). The sales lift is particularly pronounced among new customers with little prior purchase experience with the focal brand.

Receiving assistance during the gift purchase process and branded gift wrapping represent two gift purchase design characteristics which increase the effect.

Here is the story behind these findings. Laden with symbolic meaning, gift purchases create buying situations with special importance for customers' identity and are critical touchpoints during customer journeys. Eggert explains that "With so much at stake, gift purchases can deepen the customer relationship with the brand, with positive impacts on key customer metrics like attitude strength and future purchase behaviors. Our research suggests that gift purchases are an opportunity for retailers to engage customers with their brand."

Marketing managers can leverage gift purchases as effective relationship-building marketing instruments in retail settings. First, managers should identify products to position as gifts and promote them as such. Marketing managers should systematically highlight selected products in marketing communications and offer promotional incentives for consumers looking for a gift. Second, managers should target new rather than experienced customers with gift purchase promotions. Third, managers should facilitate the gift selection process. Retail store managers should train and encourage frontline employees to assist customers proactively in the gift selection process, to stimulate customer gratitude. Firms might also develop advanced online filters to help customers identify an appropriate product for specific gift-giving occasions. Fourth, retailers should make their brand more prominent on gift packaging. By providing high-quality, branded gift packaging, retailers can strengthen their customers' public commitment to the brand and stimulate long-lasting attitudinal and behavioral performance outcomes. Finally, retailers should encourage existing customers to recommend the brand to their peers for upcoming gift giving occasions.

Technology companies could be doing much more to protect individuals and organisations from the threats posed by phishing, according to research by the University of Plymouth.

However, users also need to make themselves more aware of the dangers to ensure potential scammers do not obtain access to personal or sensitive information.

Academics from Plymouth's Centre for Security, Communications and Network (CSCAN) Research assessed the effectiveness of phishing filters employed by various email service providers.

They sent two sets of messages to victim accounts, using email content obtained from archives of reported phishing attacks, with the first as plain text with links removed and the second having links retained and pointing to their original destination.

They then examined which mailbox it reached within email accounts as well as whether they were explicitly labelled in any way to denote them as suspicious or malicious.

In the significant majority of cases (75% without links and 64% with links) the potential phishing messages made it into inboxes and were not in any way labelled to highlight them as spam or suspicious. Moreover, only 6% of messages were explicitly labelled as malicious.

Professor Steven Furnell, leader of CSCAN, worked on the study with MSc student Kieran Millet and Associate Professor of Cyber Security Dr Maria Papadaki.

He said: "The poor performance of most providers implies they either do not employ filtering based on language content, or that it is inadequate to protect users. Given users' tendency to perform poorly at identifying malicious messages this is a worrying outcome. The results suggest an opportunity to improve phishing detection in general, but the technology as it stands cannot be relied upon to provide anything other than a small contribution in this context."

The number of phishing incidents has risen dramatically since they were first recorded in 2003. In fact, global software giant Kaspersky Lab reported that its anti-phishing system was triggered 482,465,211 times in 2018, almost double the number for 2017.

It is also a significant problem for businesses, with 80% telling the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2019 that they have encountered 'Fraudulent emails or being directed to fraudulent websites' - placing this category well ahead of malware and ransomware.

Phishing is designed to trick victims into divulging sensitive information, such as identity and financial-related data, and the threat can actually take several forms:

Bulk-phishing - where the approach is not specially targeted or tailored toward the recipient;

Spear-phishing - where the message is targeted at specific individuals or companies and tailored accordingly;

Clone-phishing - where the scammers take a legitimate email containing an attachment or link, and replace it with a malicious version;

Whaling - in these cases the phishing is specifically targeted towards high value or senior individuals.

Professor Furnell, who has previously led various projects relating to user-facing security, added: "Phishing has now been a problem for over a decade and a half. Unfortunately, just like malware, it's proven to be the cyber security equivalent of an unwanted genie that we can't put back in the bottle. Despite many efforts to educate users and provide safeguards, people are still falling victim. Our study shows the technology can identify things that we would ideally want users to be able to spot for themselves - but while there is a net, it clearly has big holes."

In the fraught world of today's immigration debates, ethnic enclaves are a rare point where both sides converge. Immigration restrictionists look at these communities, where immigrants speak their own languages and shop, work, and worship among themselves, and worry that the newcomers won't adopt their society's norms and values. Immigration advocates, meanwhile, think enclaves risk funneling their residents into an underclass and blocking access to economic opportunity.

These concerns are especially present in Europe, where more than 2 million people have applied for asylum since 2015, and where several countries disperse refugees across locations in part to discourage the growth of enclaves.

While unease about ethnic enclaves is widespread and deeply rooted, it's based more on optics than evidence. Now, a new study reveals that these fears may be misguided: Regional ethnic networks can actually make it easier for newcomers to gain a foothold in the local economy.

Researchers from the Immigration Policy Lab at ETH Zurich and Stanford University studied recent asylum seekers in Switzerland, and found that they were more likely to be employed if they lived close to a larger group of people who share their background. A 10 percent increase in the size of the ethnic network boosted employment by 2 percent within the first years after arrival.

"Our study shows that ethnic networks can catalyze the economic integration of refugees," said Linna Martén, a researcher at Sweden's Uppsala University. She led the study alongside Jens Hainmueller, a Stanford political science professor, and Dominik Hangartner, associate professor of public policy at ETH Zurich. "These networks can play an important role in supporting refugees as they navigate the host country's labor market during the critical first few years after their arrival."

The findings suggest that ethnic communities are not necessarily the barrier to integration that many believe them to be, and they offer new insights into an underappreciated support system refugees rely on as they rebuild their lives in a new country.

Insights from Switzerland

Switzerland offered the researchers a golden opportunity to uncover the influence of asylum seekers' social networks. First, since the country allocates asylum seekers virtually randomly across its 26 member states, or cantons, they could compare asylum seekers who were similar in just about every way except for the canton they landed in. (Partly because of this policy, Switzerland does not have "enclaves" in the traditional sense, but cantons do vary widely in their concentrations of various immigrant groups.) If the asylum seekers could choose where to live, those who opted for areas with plenty of their fellow countrymen might look very different from those who preferred to live outside these communities, and it would be impossible to isolate the effect of the networks from the many other things distinguishing the two groups.

Second, Switzerland requires refugees with "subsidiary protection" to stay put for at least five years, which means their exposure to these ethnic communities remains stable as the different groups are followed over time.

Switzerland also provided richly detailed data on each refugee. In addition to demographic profiles, the government recorded their employment status at the end of each year, their employer, the date they began working, and the kind of job they held. And the data allowed the researchers to measure refugees' social networks not just by country of origin but also by ethnicity and language--potentially important distinctions for countries whose diverse populations live within the same borders but have little else in common.

When the researchers homed in on refugees who arrived between 2008 and 2013, and tracked each new cohort for five years, a subtle but persistent trend emerged. Refugees who were assigned to live in cantons that happened to have greater numbers of people like themselves (whether shared nationality, language, or ethnicity) found jobs sooner and held those jobs more consistently. Women, who usually have employment rates of just 8 percent on average, benefitted the most from proximity to members of their own social group.

While early employment tends to be a stepping stone toward longer-term integration, it isn't a guarantee. Newcomers may be industrious but stuck doing unskilled work within their ethnic community. Yet when the researchers looked more closely at those who were employed, they found no sign that they were clustering in low-wage jobs.

Could it simply be that places with lots of immigrants are friendlier to refugees? Apparently not: When "network" was defined just by the number of immigrants, and not the number specifically with the same background, there was no positive effect on employment.

Networks and Newcomers

The likely explanation, the researchers thought, was that news of job opportunities spreads by word of mouth among members of the same social group. The data, it turned out, suggested this dynamic. Whenever refugees shared the same employer, they were also highly likely to share their ethnicity, country of origin, or language. Of those who were working, 60 percent had an employer who had hired at least one other person from their country in the past, and the share of co-national coworkers was more than twice as high within firms as within work sectors. In other words, refugees from, say, Somalia don't gravitate toward specific sectors, such as restaurant work or construction, to the same extent as they gather around specific employers.

These findings point to a practical value of ethnic networks, something that may be lost when asylum seekers and refugees are widely dispersed. Imagine you've just landed in a new place that bears very little resemblance to your home country. One of the first things you're likely to do is seek out people from home who can help you navigate and get settled. Those connections can give you tips for your job search, put in a good word with their boss, or provide an introduction to someone who can open doors. While social networks can be helpful for any immigrant, they may be especially important for refugees, who may have experienced trauma at home and face stress and uncertainty as they await a decision on their asylum applications.

At a time when unprecedented numbers of people around the world have been forced from their homes, the countries receiving them are intently focused on refugee integration, often with a focus on their employment. What would they do differently if they appreciated how ethnic networks can help channel refugees into work and self-sufficiency? Allowing refugees to tap into these organic support systems wouldn't cost much money or require the creation and administering of elaborate new programs, but it could make a difference. Ultimately, policymakers tasked with integrating these vulnerable populations must consider not just how to share the responsibility among different regions but also how to set them up for success.

Babies who have persistent fluid-filled areas in their kidneys during gestation are likely to present with urinary tract problems and to be admitted to hospital in early childhood, according to new research published by Shantini Paranjothy and colleagues at Cardiff University, UK in the open access journal PLOS Medicine on July 30.

In the UK, pregnant women have a scan at 20 weeks to identify any structural abnormalities in the developing fetus. Some of the findings in the scan are indicators of later health problems, and although fluid-filled areas of the kidneys are sometimes seen, it is not known whether this is a reliable indicator of future adverse health outcomes. The population-based cohort study on which the new research is based linked ultrasound scans with data on hospital admissions in the first 3 years of life, and the findings could be used to develop counselling for parents and care pathways in cases where the fluid-containing areas, known as renal pelvis dilatation, are observed.

The researchers used the Welsh Study of Mothers and Babies prospective, population-based cohort and included 21,239 children in their analysis. In 7.6 of every 1,000 babies, mild-to-moderate dilatation was seen at the 20-week scan, and the risk of hospital admission was more than 7 times greater in those children with renal pelvis dilatation than in those without (conditional hazard ratio 7.23, 95% CI 4.31-12.15). Risks were increased in those with later dilatation, but in most children dilatation did not persist and hospital admission rates related to urinary tract symptoms were similar to those in children with no dilatation.

Despite the large size of the study, the number of cases (138) was relatively small and so statistical power was limited. Protocols for reporting and management of renal pelvis dilation are in development, and further studies should examine whether other characteristics at the 20-week scan could improve detection of renal pathology during antenatal screening.

RNA -- the short-lived transcripts of genes -- from the "Tumat puppy", a wolf of the Pleistocene era has been isolated, and its sequence analyzed in a new study by Oliver Smith of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues publishing on July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The results establish the possibility of examining a range of RNA transcripts from ancient organisms, a possibility previously thought to be extremely unlikely because of the short lifespan of RNA.

DNA, which encodes the "hard copy" of genes, is known to survive for thousands of years under favourable conditions. But RNA -- the short-lived working copy of a gene, which is transcribed from DNA in the cell and forms the instructions for making proteins -- is rapidly broken down in living tissue by a suite of recycling enzymes. That instability typically continues after death, and because of that, researchers have generally assumed that the likelihood of finding intact an ancient cell's complement of RNA -- its transcriptome -- was vanishingly small. But there have been a few exceptions, mostly in plants, which led the authors to ask whether there might be ancient animal transcriptomes well-preserved enough to be sequenced.

They isolated and analyzed RNA from liver tissue of a 14,300-year-old canid, possibly a wolf or partially domesticated wolf-like creature, that had been preserved in Siberian permafrost until its discovery, as well as tissue from two 19th- and 20th-century wolves for comparison. Using a variety of transcriptomic techniques and quality control measures, the team showed that the RNA sequenced from the Pleistocene-era canid was truly representative of the animal's RNA, with many liver-specific transcripts that matched more modern samples from both wolves and dogs.

The Siberian canid's transcriptome is the oldest RNA sequenced by far, surpassing the next oldest transcriptome by at least 13,000 years. The authors note that unlike paleo-genomics, paleo-transcriptomics is unlikely to become routine, because even in the best conditions, RNA is not as well preserved as DNA.

Nonetheless, there are likely to be a large number of other naturally frozen specimens for which deciphering the transcriptome is possible, opening up for researchers not just the genes of ancient organisms, but the flux of cellular activity encoded by the transcriptome.

"Ancient DNA researchers have previously been reluctant to attempt to sequence ancient RNA because it is generally more unstable than DNA, and more prone to enzymatic degradation," said Dr Smith. "However, following our recent successes in sequencing ancient RNA from plant material, we speculated that a well-preserved animal specimen, frozen in the permafrost, just might retain enough material to sequence. To our delight, we found that not only did we find RNA from various tissues, but in some case the signal was so strong that we could distinguish between tissues in a way that makes biological sense.

"Knowing that RNA acts as an intermediary between DNA and proteins, both of which are more stable, it might be tempting to ask, 'so what?'. But we think the future of ancient RNA has great potential. For example, many of the most clinically relevant viruses around today have RNA genomes, and the RNA stage is often crucial to understanding the intricacies and complexities of gene regulation. This might have repercussions when discussing the environmental stresses and strains that drive evolution."

AUSTIN, Texas -- People who cheat on their spouses are significantly more likely to engage in misconduct in the workplace, according to a study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The researchers looked at the records of police officers, financial advisers, white-collar criminals and senior executives who used the Ashley Madison marital infidelity website. Operating under the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," Ashley Madison advertises itself as a dating service for married people to have "discreet encounters." Despite promises of discreetness, the data were put in the public domain through a hack in 2015 that included 36 million user accounts, including 1 million paid users in the United States.

The study, "Personal Infidelity and Professional Conduct in 4 Settings," by McCombs finance faculty members John M. Griffin and Samuel Kruger, along with Gonzalo Maturana of Emory University, found that Ashley Madison users in the professional settings they studied were more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct.

"This is the first study that's been able to look at whether there is a correlation between personal infidelity and professional conduct," Kruger said. "We find a strong correlation, which tells us that infidelity is informative about expected professional conduct."

The researchers investigated four study groups totaling 11,235 individuals using data on police officers from the Citizens Police Data Project, data on financial advisers from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority BrokerCheck database, data on defendants in SEC cases from the Securities and Exchange Commission's litigation release archives, and data on CEOs and CFOs from Execucomp.

Even after matching misconduct professionals to misconduct-free individuals with similar ages, genders and experiences and controlling for a wide range of executive and cultural variables, the researchers found that people with histories of misconduct were significantly more likely to use the Ashley Madison website.

Their findings suggest a strong connection between people's actions in their personal and professional lives and provide support for the idea that eliminating workplace sexual misconduct may also reduce fraudulent activity.

"Our results show that personal sexual conduct is correlated with professional conduct," Kruger said. "Eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace could have the extra benefit of contributing to more ethical corporate cultures in general."

Greater brand-brand competition alone will likely not lower list prices of brand-name drugs in the US, according to a study published July 30 in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Ameet Sarpatwari of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues.

US prescription drug spending has increased sharply over the last decade, with higher launch prices of new brand-name drugs and routine price increases on older brand-name drugs. Promoting greater brand-brand competition, which occurs between brand-name drugs indicated for the same condition, has been proposed to address high drug prices. Yet many examples exist of price increases following the introduction of brand-name competition, casting doubt on its effectiveness in the pharmaceutical market. To better understand the economic impact of brand-brand competition, Sarpatwari and colleagues systematically reviewed the peer-reviewed literature for studies of how new drug market entry affects prices of drugs within the same class for patients with the same indications. They searched PubMed and EconLit for original studies on brand-brand competition in the US market published in English between 1990 and April 2019, and found 10 studies evaluating a wide range of drug classes.

None of the 10 studies found that brand-brand competition lowered the list price of existing brand-name drugs within a class. The findings of two studies suggested that such competition may help restrain how new drug prices are set, however. Other studies found evidence that brand-brand competition was mediated by the relative quality of competing drugs and the extent to which they are marketed, with safer or more effective new drugs and greater marketing associated with higher intra-class list prices. According to the authors, the findings suggest that policies to promote brand-brand competition in the US pharmaceutical market, such as accelerating approval of non-first-in-class drugs, will probably not result in lower drug list prices in the absence of additional structural reforms.

Researchers at the Toyohashi University of Technology have successfully fabricated a binder-less tin phosphide (Sn4P3)/carbon (C) composite film electrode for lithium-ion batteries via aerosol deposition. The Sn4P3/C particles were directly solidified on a metal substrate via impact consolidation, without applying a binder. Charging and discharging cycling stabilities were improved by both complexed carbon and controlled electrical potential window for lithium extraction. This finding could help realize advanced lithium-ion batteries of higher capacity.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are widely used as a power source in portable electronic devices. They have recently attracted considerable attention because of their potential to be employed in large-scale as a power source for electric vehicles and plugin hybrid electric vehicles and as stationary energy storage systems for renewable energy. To realize advanced Li-ion batteries with higher energy density, anode materials with higher capacity are required. Although a few Li alloys such as Li-Si and Li-Sn, whose theoretical capacity is much higher than that of graphite (theoretical gravimetric capacity = 372 mAh/g), have been extensively studied, they generally result in poor cycling stability due to the large variation in volume during charging and discharging reactions.

Tin phosphide (Sn4P3) (theoretical gravimetric capacity = 1255 mAh/g) with layered structure, generally used as a high-capacity alloy-based anode material for Li-ion batteries, has an averaged operation potential of -0.5 V vs. Li/Li+. Reports indicate that complexing carbon materials with nano-structured Sn4P3 particles significantly enhance the cycling stability. Generally, electrodes used in batteries are fabricated by coating a slurry comprising electrode active materials, conductive carbon additives, and binders on metallic foils. For carbon complexed Sn4P3 (Sn4P3/C) anodes (such as those reported in the literature), the weight fraction of the active materials in an electrode is decreased by approximately 60-70 % because of the use of significant quantities of conductive additives and binders to achieve stable cycling. Consequently, the gravimetric specific capacity per electrode weight (including those of conductive carbon additives and binders) is decreased significantly.

Researchers at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology, have successfully fabricated a binder-less Sn4P3/C composite film electrode for Li-ion battery anodes via aerosol deposition (AD). In this process, the Sn4P3 particles are complexed with acetylene black using simple ball-milling method; the obtained Sn4P3/C particles are then directly solidified on a metal substrate via impact consolidation without adding any other conductive additives or binders. This method enables enhancement of the fraction of Sn4P3 in the composite to above 80%. Furthermore, structural change of the composite electrode is reduced and cycling stability is improved for both complexed carbon and controlled electrical potential window for lithium extraction reaction. The Sn4P3/C composite film fabricated by the AD process maintains gravimetric capacities of approximately 730 mAh/g, 500 mAh mAh/g, and 400 mAh mAh/g at 100th, 200th, and 400th cycles, respectively.

The first author Toki Moritaka is quoted as saying, "Although optimizing the deposition conditions was difficult, useful information on enhancement of cycling stability of the Sn4P3/C composite film electrode fabricated by the AD process was obtained. The complexed carbon functions not only as a buffer to suppress the collapse of electrodes caused by the large variation in volume of Sn4P3, but also as an electronic conduction path among the atomized active material particles in the composite."

"This process is an effective means to increase the capacity value per electrode weight. We believe there is scope for improvement of the electrochemical performance by the size and content of the carbon in Sn4P3/C used in composite film fabrication by the AD process. We are now trying to optimize the complexed carbon content and increase the composite film thickness," quotes Associate Professor Ryoji Inada.

The findings of this study may contribute to the realization of advanced Li-ion batteries of higher capacity. Moreover, because not only Li but Na can also be stored in and extracted from Sn4P3 by similar alloying and dealloying reactions, the Sn4P3 electrode can be employed in next-generation Na-ion batteries at much lower costs.

The more rainfall a region in sub-Saharan Africa gets, the more mosquitoes proliferate there and the more likely its residents will sleep under their insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria transmission, a new study from the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs suggests. CCP is based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

While it has become clear in recent years that net use is higher in the rainy season than in the dry season, the results, published this month in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, are the first to quantify this phenomenon. This new data will allow malaria control programs to see what times of year net use is lagging and use the information to intensify behavior change messages to boost net use before malaria transmission peaks, even if it doesn't seem like the mosquitoes are biting yet.

"What we are seeing by studying rainfall patterns is that in places with year-round rainfall, which means year-round malaria transmission, people who have bed nets are using them all year, which is great news," says CCP's Hannah Koenker, PhD, MPH, who led the study.

In countries with a dry season, the new data show that net use peaks six to eight weeks after rains begin, which corresponds with the time it takes mosquitoes to breed and build up their populations. Malaria transmission can happen before then, however. "By better understanding seasonal patterns of net use, we can make more informed decisions about how to most effectively deploy nets and when it makes sense to heavily promote their use," she says.

To conduct the research, Koenker and her colleagues brought together data from multiple years of net use surveys from countries across sub-Saharan Africa, and assessed monthly net use using large datasets of precipitation, temperature, demographics and malaria incidence to better understand when and where people use their nets throughout the year.

Koenker says the findings make it clear that those who study and promote net use must consider the time of year that these assessments take place. If a survey is done in the rainy season and the next is conducted in the dry season, it may appear that net use has dramatically fallen off, when it is in fact part of the normal seasonal cycle of net use. Likewise, she says, increases in net use from survey to survey could be skewed if the second survey is simply conducted when it is rainier.

"We all need to take the season into account when interpreting data around net use," Koenker says.

In addition, she says, "it is critical to use social and behavior change interventions that encourage people who have nets to use them during times when transmission is just starting, and when the rains stop but transmission is still happening. This may mean that some programs may need to redirect behavior change efforts toward the dry season, and work to convince people that it is worthwhile to use their nets even when mosquito abundance and perceived risk may be quite low."

The World Health Organization estimates that between 2000 and 2015 the rate of new malaria cases declined by 37 percent globally and malaria deaths fell by 60 percent, with 6.2 million lives saved. Three quarters of those gains can be attributed to interventions such as insecticide-treated bed nets.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Anyone can express their commitment to the environment through individual efforts, but some pro-environmental or "green" behaviors may be seen as either feminine or masculine, which Penn State researchers say may have social consequences.

In a series of studies, the researchers evaluated specific pro-environmental behaviors that previous research suggested were seen as either "feminine" or "masculine" and examined whether they affected how people were perceived.

They found that men and women were more likely to question a man's sexual orientation if he engaged in "feminine" pro-environmental behaviors, such as using reusable shopping bags. They were also more likely to question a woman's sexual orientation if she engaged in "masculine" pro-environmental behaviors, such as caulking windows.

Additionally, men were more likely to avoid women who were interested in "masculine" pro-environmental behaviors.

Janet K. Swim, professor of psychology, said it is important to understand these social consequences because they may hold people back from engaging in behaviors that could ultimately help the environment.

"There may be subtle, gender-related consequences when we engage in various pro-environmental behaviors," Swim said. "People may avoid certain behaviors because they are managing the gendered impression they anticipate others will have of them. Or they may be avoided if the behaviors they choose do not match their gender."

According to the researchers, environmentalism in general may be seen as feminine because it fits in with women's traditional role as caregivers. Yet, particular pro-environmental behaviors can align with traditional feminine or masculine roles.

"Behaviors don't just help us accomplish something concrete, they also signal something about who we are," Swim said. "Line drying clothes or keeping tires at proper pressures may signal that we care about the environment, but if those behaviors are seen as gendered, they may signal other things, as well."

In three studies with a total of 960 participants, the researchers assessed impressions and avoidance of men and women engaging in "feminine" and "masculine" behaviors.

During the first two studies, participants read fictional summaries of a person's daily activities, which included either feminine, masculine or neutral pro-environmental behaviors. Participants then rated whether the person had masculine or feminine traits and guessed what the person's sexual orientation might be.

"Reflecting the tendency to see environmentalism as feminine, all the people were rated as more feminine than masculine regardless of the behaviors they did," Swim said. She also noted that the tendency was strongest when either women or men engaged in feminine behaviors.

The researchers found that participants whose behaviors conformed to their gender were seen as more heterosexual than those whose behaviors did not conform to their gender, which may suggest participants were using traditional gender roles as clues to sexual identity.

Additionally, the researchers indicated that while participants did not view the nonconformists as gay or lesbian, their ratings suggested that on average they were uncertain about whether the person was heterosexual.

"If being seen as heterosexual is important to a person, that person may prioritize gender-conforming over gender-nonconforming pro-environmental behaviors in anticipation of how others might see them," Swim said.

The researchers did a third study to examine whether people avoided others based on the other person's pro-environmental behavior preferences. In a room with several other people, participants completed a digital survey where they indicted which environmental topics they would like to discuss with a partner.

The participants were then given a list of what they believed to be the topic preferences of four other participants. The list included a woman and a man who preferred discussing gender-conforming behaviors, as well as a woman and a man who preferred gender-nonconforming behaviors. The participants were then asked to rank whom they would prefer to be partnered with in order of preference.

The researchers found that women avoided men more than women, as well as people who were interested in masculine rather than feminine behaviors. According to the researchers, although women's partner preferences showed gender biases, these preferences did not seem to be based on whether other's behaviors conformed to gender roles or not.

In contrast, the researchers found that men were more likely to distance themselves from women engaging in masculine behaviors than any of the other three potential partners. They were equally interested in partnering with women engaging in feminine behaviors and men who engaged in masculine or feminine behaviors.

The researchers said these results suggested that compared to men, women were more likely to experience negative social consequences from men for engaging in non-gender role-conforming pro-environmental behaviors.

"We were surprised that it was only women who experienced being avoided if they engaged in nonconforming gender-role behaviors," Swim said. "We can't say why this is happening, but it is a social consequence. Women may be experiencing this negative feedback and might not know why."

The researchers said that the paper -- recently published in the journal Sex Roles -- underlines the importance of continuing to study gender stereotypes surrounding environmentalism and its associated behaviors. They added that activists and policymakers who are trying to promote pro-environmental behaviors may want to take these pressures to conform to gender roles into account as possible barriers.

In the future, Swim said she and her fellow researchers will continue to study the effects of pro-environmental behaviors, such as whether social repercussions affect whether a person is willing to do a behavior or not.

AURORA, Colo. (July 30, 2019) - A pair of new journal articles by researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine indicate that both genetic and environmental factors play significant roles in the onset of vitiligo, an autoimmune disease that results in the loss of color in blotches of skin.

The findings also show that while the tools for scientific understanding of the genetic basis of a complex disease like vitiligo have advanced, there are still many other as-yet unidentified factors that contribute to vitiligo's onset.

"Vitiligo has been perhaps the easiest of all complex diseases to sort out," said senior author Richard A. Spritz, MD, director of the Human Medical Genetics Program and professor of pediatrics at the CU School of Medicine. "Through years of previous studies, we have identified what could be called a 'vitiligo parts list' of 50 common contributory genes/risk variants."

Spritz and his co-authors reviewed two types of vitiligo cases - simplex and multiplex. In most instances, vitiligo appears in individuals with no family history of the disease, which are referred to as the simplex cases. In the multiplex cases, there are other family members with vitiligo.

A paper by Spritz and his co-authors in the American Journal of Human Genetics combines the 50 vitiligo common risk variants together to make a vitiligo "genetic risk score," and then compared the simplex and multiplex cases.

"The paper could be called a first chapter to the 'vitiligo instruction manual,'" Spritz said. "We found that the vitiligo genetic risk score is higher in the multiplex families than in the simplex cases, and the more affected relatives in the family the higher the risk score. That means that vitiligo in multiplex families and simplex cases is basically the same, but that the families with multiple affected relatives have higher genetic risk. That means that the same treatments probably will be effective in both types of cases."

That finding complicates the ability of scientists and physicians who want to predict who might be affected by vitiligo. Simplex cases and multiplex cases seem to mostly involve the same underlying genetic variants, with different patients just having different combinations of genetic risk variants. Such a finding complicates the use of predictive personalized medicine to diagnose and treat complex diseases, Spritz said, because there doesn't appear to be genetically-defined patient subgroups with different underlying biology who might thus respond differentially to personalized treatments.

In addition to Spritz, the authors of the article are Genevieve H.L. Roberts, a PhD candidate in human medical genetics and genomics at CU Anschutz Medical Campus at the time of writing the article; Subrata Paul, a PhD candidate in statistics at CU Denver; Daniel Yorgov, PhD, assistant professor of applied statistics at Purdue University Fort Wayne; and Stephanie Santorico, PhD, professor and director of statistical programs at the Colorado School of Public Health. This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

In the second article, which is published as a letter to the editor in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, Spritz and his co-authors note that the average age of the onset of vitiligo in patients has changed dramatically over past decades.

"Vitiligo converted from being principally a pediatric-onset to principally an adult-onset disease over the period 1970-2004," Spritz said. "That is amazing. Our genes haven't changed over that period of time; altered genes or even gene effects don't seem to be the cause. This must reflect some beneficial environmental change that somehow delays or reduces vitiligo triggering in people who are genetically susceptible. What was it? We don't know."

The authors write that one or more environmental changes seem to have altered triggering of vitiligo and delayed disease onset, with a similar pattern both in North America and in Europe. "While this apparently beneficial change provides an extraordinary inroad to discover vitiligo environmental triggers, the number of potential candidates is enormous," Spritz and his colleagues write.

Among just a few of the possibilities in the United States: The Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Water Quality Act of 1969, the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970. Globally, sunscreens with sun protection factor ratings were introduced in 1974. Even eating habits may contribute. The authors note that yogurt consumption became more common in the early 1970s, which potentially altered the gut microbiome for many people.

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have teamed up with colleagues in Russia and Saudi Arabia and proposed an efficient method for obtaining fundamental data necessary for understanding chemical and physical processes involving substances in the gaseous state. The proposed numerical protocol predicts the thermal effect of gas-phase formation of silver compounds and their absolute entropy. This includes first-ever such data for over 90 compounds. Published in the journal Inorganic Chemistry, the findings are important for the practical applications of substances containing silver: in water and wound disinfection, photography, rainmaking via cloud seeding, etc.

The team derived the precise values of two key characteristics -- the enthalpy of formation and the entropy -- of numerous silver compounds. The enthalpy (from Greek "thalpein," meaning "to heat") of a system describes its state in terms of the energy of the constituent particles, pressure, and volume. According to Hess' law, by multiplying stoichiometric coefficients and the difference between the formation enthalpies of the reactants and those of the products, one gets the amount of heat generated or consumed in a chemical reaction. Entropy is a measure of how disordered a system is. The second law of thermodynamics states that a system can spontaneously adopt a less organized state, so entropy grows with time.

Knowing the values of enthalpy and entropy is crucial for predicting whether a reaction will ever occur at given conditions. These characteristics also indicate how reaction yield and selectivity -- the ratio between products -- vary with temperature and pressure, allowing for optimization. The findings enable researchers to make predictions concerning chemical processes occurring in the gas phase. The data will also help manage the processes involved in thin film and pure sample deposition from the gas phase.

There are basically two ways for determining enthalpy and entropy changes: either through complex and costly experiments or by using the data from reference books and doing some arithmetic based on Hess' law.

"The choice seems to be obvious, more so considering that you cannot experimentally measure the heat of some reactions," said Yury Minenkov, senior researcher at the Laboratory of Supercomputing Methods in Condensed Matter Physics. "For example, incomplete graphite combustion always yields both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. So even by measuring the thermal effect of the reaction we could not determine carbon monoxide formation enthalpy.

"But the computational approach faces some problems," Minenkov went on. "First, the enthalpies of formation and entropies are not known for every compound. Second, even if the data are available, no one can guarantee their accuracy. The values vary widely between reference books. At times, the measurement errors may be quite large."

Luckily, quantum chemistry helps obtain the entropy and, to some extent, the enthalpy data. Each constituent molecule of a gaseous substance can be viewed as a system of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons. Researchers can then apply electronic structure calculation methods to solve the molecular Schrödinger equation. This reveals the total electronic energy of the molecule, its wave function, and the spatial configuration of nuclei -- that is, its 3D geometric structure. Physicists can then calculate the entropy and enthalpy of an ideal gas composed of such molecules. The entropy values obtained in this way are then introduced into reference books and used in thermodynamic calculations.

The problem with enthalpy is that, not being a fundamental value at this point, it significantly depends on the chosen method for Schrödinger equation calculation.

Atomization reactions are usually employed to calculate the enthalpy of formation. In such reactions, the compound of interest breaks down into individual atoms. For example, silver sulfide -- Ag2S -- yields one sulfur and two silver atoms. Since the enthalpies of formation of atomic substances are well-known and reported in reference books, it is possible to calculate the enthalpy of formation of the initial substance -- in this case, silver sulfide -- by finding the enthalpy change in the reaction via quantum chemistry methods.

However, when molecules composed of many atoms undergo atomization, this affects the electronic structure to such an extent that enthalpy, too, is significantly changed. The currently available methods of theoretical chemistry cannot account for these effects with enough accuracy.

The team of researchers from MIPT, the Frumkin Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ivanovo State University of Chemistry and Technology, and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology has published a series of papers proposing a way to calculate the thermodynamic characteristics of organic and inorganic compounds with more accuracy.

In the case of silver sulfide, the researchers found its enthalpy of formation from the reaction with hydrochloric acid, which yields silver chloride and hydrogen sulfide (fig. 2). Since the number of bonds in the top row is the same as in the bottom row, the change in energy can be calculated with the least error.

The heats of formation for silver chloride, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrochloric acid are known with a high accuracy, and computer modeling reveals the thermal effect of the reaction. From these data, one can derive the heat of formation of silver sulfide using Hess' law.

"The classic coupled-cluster approach, known as CCSD(T), is the gold standard for solving the electronic Schrödinger equation in modern quantum chemistry," Minenkov explained. "We replaced it with the local version called DLPNO-CCSD(T), which was developed not long ago at Max Planck Institute. This shrank the required computing power by an order of magnitude. Under the conventional CCSD(T), the computation time varies with the size N of the molecule as N7, so it is not an option for large molecules. The local version is much less time- and resource consuming."

The team began by checking how well the results of their quantum chemical calculations agreed with the experimental thermodynamic and structural data. Reference books reported the values for 10 silver compounds, and they were a good match. Having thus ensured that their model is adequate, the researchers calculated the thermodynamic characteristics for 90 silver compounds missing in the books. The data are of use to both scientists working in the field of silver chemistry and for testing and calibrating new methods of electronic structure calculation.

Toronto - Credit default swaps (CDS) were heavily criticized for being a major contributor to the 2008/09 financial crisis.

But a new study shows that these market-based insurance tools have also served as a stabilizing force, protecting against stock price plunges and higher borrowing costs in the event a firm receives a downgrade from a credit rating agency. CDS are typically bought by lenders to hedge against a borrowing company's potential default on its loans.

"We're trying to shed a different light, showing that CDS is not such a bad thing. It can have a positive outcome for capital markets," says Chayawat Ornthanalai, an associate professor of finance at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management who co-authored the study with two other researchers.

The researchers looked at the experience of 644 companies between 1996 and 2010. Some 283 of them saw the introduction of CDS contracts on their debt during that period. Those companies covered by CDS saw a 44 to 52 percent reduction in drops to their stock prices after a credit downgrade, compared to companies with an identical downgrade but with no CDS.

And while they still absorbed some impact, having their debt covered by CDS meant downgraded companies did not take as heavy a hit to their operations, with fewer reductions in their debt and investments and less significant increases to their borrowing costs, compared to companies not covered by CDS. Firms with the greatest drop in stock price, despite having CDS, tended to be those in the "speculative grade" category - with ratings in the lower grade strata -- or with more conditions attached to their loans that were linked to their credit rating.

The researchers caution that CDS contracts aren't a replacement for the information provided by credit ratings, but their results suggest that CDS can act as a complement, using a market-based indicator of a firm's default risk instead of an analyst's opinion.

Prof. Ornthanalai says people shouldn't confuse the positive uses of CDS highlighted in his research with the situation leading to the financial crisis.

"CDS was not the main issue," he says. In some cases, CDS got "tied into pools of badness," created by the abuse of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), where debt from multiple sources was repackaged into a single product and sold by banks and corporations to buyers.

As well, some investors engaged in highly speculative and predatory trading against the potential default of a company in which they had no other direct interest, a situation Prof. Ornthanalai compares to "insuring your relatives and then murdering them for the insurance money."

Cigarette smoke can make MRSA bacterial strains more resistant to antibiotics, new research from the University of Bath has shown.

In addition cigarette smoke exposure can make some strains of Staphylococcus aureus - a microbe present in 30-60% of the global population and responsible for many diseases, some fatal - more invasive and persistent, although the effect is not universal across all strains tested.

The researchers believe the stress cigarette smoke causes to S. aureus sparks an emergency 'SOS' response, which increases the rate of mutation in microbial DNA, resulting in hardy and persistent variants better able to resist antibiotics.

Previous studies had attributed smokers' increased susceptibility to infection to the damaging effects of smoke on our immune system, but this study shows that it may also be changing the DNA and characteristics of pathogenic microbes as well.

In a series of lab-based experiments the researchers from Bath, working with colleagues from Imperial College London, University of Oxford and Institut d'Investigació Germans Trias i Pujol, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and CIBER Enfermedades Respiratorias, Spain, exposed six reference strains of the most important 'superbug' Methicillin- Resistant S. aureus (MRSA) clones to cigarette smoke.

The strains were known to cause conditions ranging from skin infections to pneumonia and endocarditis and were chosen for their clinical relevance and genetic diversity. Although not all responded to cigarette smoke in the same way some, including those known to cause invasive infections, showed increased resistance to the antibiotic rifampicin and increased invasiveness and persistence. Resistance to other antibiotics is also likely to be affected.

The study links these changes to the emergence of Small Colony Variants (SCVs) - hardy sub-populations that are adapted to harsh conditions. SCVs have been linked to chronic infections in smokers in previous research.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Lead author Dr Maisem Laabei, from the University of Bath's Department of Biology & Biochemistry, said: "We expected some effects but we didn't anticipate smoke would affect drug-resistance to this degree. We recognise that exposure in a lab is different to inhaled smoke over a long time, but it seems reasonable to hypothesise, based on our research and others' that stressful conditions imposed by smoking induce responses in microbial cells leading to adaptation to harsh conditions, with the net effect of increasing virulence and/or potential for infection.

"Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide, and cigarette smoke has over 4,800 compounds within it.

"We wanted to study S. aureus because it's so common in humans and it can cause a range of diseases, so we wanted to see what happened when we exposed it to smoke.

"These Small Colony Variants are highly adhesive, invasive and persistent. They can sit around for a long time, are difficult to kick out, and are linked to chronic infections. We hope that our work provides another reason for people not to smoke and for current smokers to quit."

The scientists are now interested in studying how air pollution, from diesel exhaust fumes and other sources, might affect the microbes in our nasal passages as many of the pollution compounds are the same as in cigarette smoke.